According to a study taken up by Aqua Security, most of the cyber attacks seen on cloud servers are mostly related to cryptocurrency mining malware rather than other forms. The research that was taken in between June 2019 and July 2020 states that out of 16,378 attacks observed on cloud platforms, most of them were related to malware or decoys deployed in one form or the other.
Aqua Security 2020 Cloud Native Threat report says that the said form of attacks increased by 250% from the previous year and the development suggests that the attack landscape has moved its base towards organized crime, where cyber crooks are hired to launch attacks on CSPs.
The year 2019 witnessed most of the hackers seen deploying crypto mining malware on cloud containers and only a few were witnessed to be used for transferring data to remote servers or to launch other form of attacks like DDoS.
As there is an increased collaboration between threat actors, a surge in the frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks is been observed. For instance, threat actors are seen as multi-stage payloads and 64-bit encoding to avoid detection.
Unpatched systems, human configuration blunders, brute force attacks, easy guess passwords were seen offering hackers a strong chance to exploit cloud servers from the beginning of this year.
Note 1- Crypto jacking or Cryptocurrency mining malware- A malware that is used to mine cryptocurrency by deploying it on computer platforms fraudulently is called crypto currency mining or crypto mining malware. So, hackers are seen harnessing the processing power of many networked computers to generate revenue in bitcoins.
Note 2-According to a study made by AdGuard, over 500 million users are seen unknowingly mining crypto currencies on their computing devices such as tablets and smart phones.
